Samuel D. Sturgis

Samuel Davis Sturgis (11 June 1822-28 September 1889) was a Union Army Brigadier-General during the American Civil War.

Biography
Samuel Davis Sturgis was born in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania in 1822, and he graduated from West Point in 1846 and served in the US Army dragoons during the Mexican-American War, being held as a prisoner of war for eight days. In August 1861, at the Battle of Wilson's Creek during the American Civil War, he took command of Nathaniel Lyon's army after Lyon's death in battle, and he was brevetted a Brigadier-General of volunteers. He later commanded a division at the Battle of Antietam and the Battle of Fredericksburg, and his defeat at the hands of Nathan Bedford Forrest at Brice's Crossroads in June 1864 ended his service in the war. He later fought in the Plains Indian Wars; after the defeat at the Battle of Little Big Horn (in which Sturgis' son was killed), he took command of the 7th Cavalry in the campaign against the Nez Perce. From 1886 to 1886, he was Governor of the Soldiers' Home in Washington DC, and he retired in 1886 and died in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1889. His grandson Samuel D. Sturgis Jr. would later also become a US Army Lieutenant-General.